Data sheet
Neme: Monument for Rita Finzi
Location: field 1, no. 27
Author: Riccardo Pitter (sculptor)
Construction date: 1924
Rita Finzi died at the age of 22 in 1924. She is buried with her parents Lodovico and Olimpia Segré.
The sculptor Riccardo Pitter (1899-1976) from Aviano, a pupil of Wildt and Castiglioni, carves a bas-relief with a young woman flying in the middle of a cloud of roses. Pitter has created more than 150 funerary monuments in Milan and its province.
Prospero Moisé Loria was born in Mantua in 1812. He was the son of merchant Leon Donato Loria. Thanks to his father’s inheritance he moved to Trieste where he devoted himself to the timber trade and then to Alexandria in Egypt where he, along with his brother Salomon Aron, became the exclusive supplier of ties for the new Egyptian railways under construction from the Mediterranean to the Red Sea. After moving to Milan in his old age, before he died he had the idea of creating a “Humanitarian Society”, capable of “putting the underprivileged, without distinction, in a position to become richer, providing them with support, work and education”.
Upon his death in 1892 he left over ten million lire for this purpose and the Company became operational in 1902 and had the collaboration of reformist intellectuals and politicians, committed women, professionals and artists. It built innovative public housing districts and instituted professional training courses, opened popular libraries and employment offices in various Italian cities.
Prospero Loira is buried next to his wife Anna Tedeschi who died in 1868. The simplicity of the tomb and the epigraph were significant because they were the expression of his enlightenment and rationalist culture: “Ashes of P.M. Loira, he desired autopsy and cremation, a useful custom, 1814-1892”. These two practices not really aligned with Jewish orthodoxy.
